Professor Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security, gave her expert opinion to Law & Crime in an article on a report that President Trump’s Department of Justice seized data from top House Intelligence Committee Democrats.
Explosive revelations that Trump’s Department of Justice seized records tied to top House Intelligence Committee Democrats, their staffers and their family members spurred comparisons across the cable networks of turbocharged Richard Nixon-like tactics.
Ex-FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi told MSNBC that it appeared Trump had a “blacklist of enemies” that “seemingly included only Democrats,” a practice that he could not recall in decades serving from the trenches to the leadership of the bureau. Figliuzzi’s remarks about an enemies list carried particular weight from the former head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division under Robert Mueller in 2011.
Asking three top national security experts about the comparison in phone interviews, Law&Crime received a variety of responses. One found Donald Trump’s modus operandi too scattershot for Nixon’s cunning to feel apt. Another found the analogy downplayed the danger of the current moment, and third found the political motivations of both to be clear.
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For Fordham Law School’s Center on National Security director Karen Greenberg, the Nixon analogy undersells the danger.
“It’s nice to recall the echoes of the past and the Nixon times, but I think we’re in a whole new ballgame,” Greenberg told Law&Crime in a phone interview. “I think it’s quite frightening also, to notice. We don’t know the extent of this surveillance. We only know what we’ve been told so far. We don’t know how long it was, how many people were considered enemies. So I think in some ways, this is a very new and different chapter.”